What to Expect When You’re Expecting Swine Flu

The vaccine for H1N1 came out this week, and New York’s health system is braced for pandemic. But with so many people opting out, many more New Yorkers are bound to come down with the illness I’ve had for the past week. This is my story, and what to expect if — more like when — you get the swine flu,too.

First, let’s get this out of the way: The swine flu is not exotic at this point. It’s been running rampant through the Southeast for months now. Celebrities even have it. So, for healthy adults, it’s really not that big of a deal. It’s similar to the regular flu, just much more contagious (and with one big tweak). Nevertheless, it is not to be confused with a nasty cold or allergies run rampant. Here’s how you’ll know thedifference.

1. It starts in the lymph nodes, then hits you in the knees.
I’d had swollen glands in my neck for a couple of days, but passed them off as change-of-season allergies. But Friday night, in the midst of seeing a play, my knees started aching terribly. By intermission I was by the bar, guzzling wine in denial and starting to tremble with chills. I had to lean against a wall just to stand up straight. By the time I crawled into bed around midnight, I had a fever of 101.6. Come morning, it was up to 104, and the pain had spread from my knees to a whole-body ache. I was thrashing about, teeth chattering, in a full-on malarial stupor, feeling around in the bedside drawer for stray Advil and crying for my mommy. Also, my throat was starting to feel weird…

2. Unless you already have Tamiflu lying around, don’t even bother.
Once I’d gotten some Advil down and the fever had (slightly) lessened, I called my mom, a pediatric ICU nurse in Tallahassee. Having had H1N1 herself already, she gave the usual tips (fluids, alternating Advil and Tylenol to keep the fever down) and some surprising advice: “Unless you get a rash, are having breathing problems, or start vomiting to the point where you can’t keep anything down, don’t go to the emergency room.” But I wanted Tamiflu! Tamiflu was my right as an American! “Tamiflu will only take about half a day off of your sickness and you’ll spend as much time or more waiting in the ER, giving what you have to everyone else there,” she said, reasonably. “Besides, Tamiflu has its own side effects that will just make you feel worse.” So I decided to abandon the Tamifluquest.

3. Make your own chart and keep your fever in line.
The first and worst symptom of this flu was a high fever that needed to be dominated. So Saturday morning, I took out a notebook and made a chart, imaginatively titling it “Lindsay’s Flu Chart.” Despite sleeping for the better part of three days, I managed to note, in scribbles and scratches, the time of every dose of Advil, Tylenol, Aleve, etc., along with my temperature. OTC painkillers such as Advil and Tylenol claim to work for four to six hours, but as fever reducers, this is total bullshit. (And Aleve does nothing. Nothing.) I needed a dose of something every couple of hours just to keep my fever below 101, so I set my alarm for every two hours to pop a pill and scribble on my sad little chart. But it worked — once this system was in place, my fever didn’t get out of control again. But the self-congratulation didn’tlast.

4. Oops! Actually, the fever isn’t the worst part.
The worst of it came in slowly on Saturday afternoon: an excruciating, horrifying, unimaginably painful sore throat, the likes of which you haven’t experienced unless you’ve had strep as an adult. But, unlike strep, which quickly improves within the first few hours of antibiotics, this sore throat is caused by a virus, and it will last for a week. It will make you ask yourself questions like, “If I knew I would have this sore throat for the rest of my life, would I choose to go on living?” And the answer will be, “No.” It’s every kind of sore throat (scratchy, itchy, stinging, burning, dry, sharp) all rolled into one, and while a few remedies can briefly make a tiny dent in it (gargling with salt water, hot tea, numbing spray, Ben & Jerry’s Cinnamon Bun ice cream), nothing can make it bearable. Nothing. So have all those things around the house, but don’t expect them to help.Sorry.

Other symptoms were similar to a cold: stuffy nose, a mild post-nasal (not lung) cough, stinging eyes, complete lack of appetite, etc. But I barely noticed them because the throat was theThing.

5. Your friends will abandon you.
Well, sort of. Your friends will show great selfish curiosity about how you contracted swine flu (as if you can possibly pinpoint it — “I dunno, the subway? It’s a fucking pandemic!”), and will each make the exact same joke about bringing over soup, ringing the buzzer, and then running away before you open the door. You will tolerate them, because it’s actually true that you can’t see anybody and you don’t want to risk giving anyone what you have anyway. TV is your newfriend.

6. Don’t bother getting tested. Just get painkillers.
When I walked into my doctor’s office on Monday and announced to the receptionist that I had swine flu, she was very cross with me, gesturing to the other people in the waiting room — I could make them sick, you know — but I could not be made to feel like a pariah. I was covered in Purell, I had a tissue at the ready in case I coughed, and I was seeing the goddamned doctor. My doctor came out immediately and took me to a back room, making a little joke about quarantine. “You know, unless they get the vaccine, everyone’s going to get it, so don’t feel too bad,” she said. I asked whether she was going to test me for swine flu and she explained that because the test is expensive and unreliable, and because H1N1 is now so prevalent, health-care professionals are no longer testing for it and are just assuming any case of the flu at this time isH1N1.

But my main concern at this point was that I had strep, because I was pretty sure I had some sort of Knife-in-Throat disease. The doctor took one look at my throat and said “This doesn’t look like strep — but oh dear, you’re not allergic to Vicodin, are you?” Apparently my throat was swollen enough to merit Vicodin! We’re saved! The doctor took a strep culture just in case, and wrote me prescriptions for an antibiotic (in case I would later need it), and, bless her heart, prescribed me ten big, beautiful Vicodin pills to get me through the rest of my fluodyssey.

So that’s it: You’re probably going to get swine flu, so have supplies lying around (a swine flu “go bag,” as it were). And Tamiflu is so three months ago — today’s discriminating swine-flu patient demands Vicodin. Oh, and because you will forget what being hungry ever felt like, you will lose at least five pounds by the end of your pig-flu adventure. So there’sthat.

The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday.

Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.”

“A Director of National Intelligence has never prevented a properly submitted whistleblower complaint that the [inspector general] determined to be credible and urgent from being provided to the congressional intelligence committees. Never,” Schiff said in a statement. “This raises serious concerns about whether White House, Department of Justice or other executive branch officials are trying to prevent a legitimate whistleblower complaint from reaching its intended recipient, the Congress, in order to cover up serious misconduct.”

Schiff indicated that he learned the matter involved “potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community,” raising the specter that it is “being withheld to protect the President or other Administration officials.”

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group on Saturday attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility, in a strike that three sources said had disrupted output and exports.

Two sources close to the matter said 5 million barrels per day of crude production had been impacted — close to half of the kingdom’s output or 5% of global oil supply.

The pre-dawn drone attack on the Saudi Aramco facilities set off several fires, although the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter, later said these were brought under control.

Candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are sprinting from coast to coast in search of campaign donations over the next 18 days, moving urgently to stockpile cash for their big fall push — and to avoid a death spiral that a weak third-quarter fundraising tally might prompt. …

Still, Democratic donors have expressed nervousness in recent weeks that some presidential hopefuls could post disappointing totals, compounding the candidates’ broader struggles. July and August tend to be slow for fundraising, with many people on vacation and tuned out of politics. The large and unpredictably fluid field also has made it difficult for donors to commit to a candidate.

“The third quarter number, from a finance standpoint, will define the narrative throughout the course of the fall, when these questions about viability for so many of the candidates are so real, especially in the second and third tiers,” said Rufus Gifford, the finance director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaignand a donor to at least three candidates so far this year.

While MIT engages in damage control following revelations the university’s Media Lab accepted millions of dollars in funding from Jeffrey Epstein, a renowned computer scientist at the university has fanned the flames by apparently going out of his way to defend the accused sex trafficker—and child pornography in general.

Richard Stallman has been hailed as one of the most influential computer scientists around today and honored with a slew of awards and honorary doctorates, but his eminence in the academic computer science community came into question Friday afternoon when purportedly leaked email excerpts showed him suggesting one of Epstein’s alleged victims was “entirely willing.”

An MIT engineering alumna, Selam Jie Gano, published a blog post calling for Stallman’s removal from the university in light of his comments, along with excerpts from the email in which Stallman appeared to defend both Epstein and Marvin Minsky, a lauded cognitive scientist and founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab who was accused of assaulting Virginia Giuffre.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young liberal icon from New York, has endorsed Senator Ed Markey’s reelection bid next year, as Representative Joe Kennedy III considers challenging Markey for what promises to be the nation’s most competitive congressional primary.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have worked together as the primary sponsors of the Green New Deal, the signature legislative issue for both lawmakers.

ABC’s coverage of the 10-candidate forum draws the largest preliminary ratings for any debate so far this cycle.

ABC and Univision scored strong ratings Thursday with their coverage of the third Democratic presidential primary debate.

The debate, featuring 10 candidates and current frontrunners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sharing the stage for the first time, drew a 10.0 household rating in Nielsen’s 56 metered markets. That’s 23 percent higher than the 8.1 NBC got for part two of the first debate on June 27, but about 25 percent lower than combined metered-market average for NBC and MSNBC. That telecast ended up with 18.1 million viewers across NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo.

Beginning speech to Concerned Women of America, @SecPompeo says “this is such a beautiful hotel. The guy who owns it must gonna be successful along the way,” he says, without mentioning @realDonaldTrump by name. “That was for the Washington Post,” he says of his remark. pic.twitter.com/vPYp9vYE9y

Child care, a key issue for many Americans, is getting little attention at the debates

Millions of Americans struggle to find decent, affordable child care every year. But when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to bring up the subject during Thursday’s Democratic debate, in response to a question about education, a moderator cut her off.

“Start with our babies by providing universal child care for every baby age 0 to 5, universal pre-K for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in this country,” Warren said, just getting on a roll when ABC moderator Linsey Davis interrupted. “Thank you, senator,” Davis said.

Davis was just following the rules: Warren’s time for the response had lapsed. But the moment was a perfect metaphor for the attention child care and other work-family issues have gotten in these debates ― or, more accurately, the attention they have not gotten in these debates.

After the debate, Castro is being criticized for his kamikaze attack on Biden, while journalists are toiling away trying to transcribe Biden’s “record player” response

Biden was asked whether he still held these attitudes: “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” What follows is a transcript of his rambling answer (I have omitted nothing), which for some reason includes references to record players and Venezuela:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.